I’m really into my Google Maps at the moment. With the amount I’m using it, it’s easily my favourite Google service, except maybe Gmail. Or Reader. Or Analytics. Screw it, they’re all brilliant.
The latest creation comes from a service called map a list, which Lifehacker played with a month ago. I couldn’t think of a decent use for it myself, but someone pointed out that it would be fantastic for mapping customers who have signed up their details with a company. A massive advantage is that a business owner can immediately see whether handing out leaflets or flyers has had the intended effect. It works really nicely: link it to your Google account, select a spreadsheet to pull data from, link columns in the spreadsheet to address fields and… boom!
Here’s the service containing a bit of post code data (and with hindsight, I could have used it for my earlier post on mapping friends). Love it.
Spent half an hour this evening trying to think on what the deal with iTunes’ new Genius feature is… nobody’s totally clear on how it works, so I thought I’d half-heartedly check into whether it works better for people with a more mainstream music taste or not. Here’s the results from me pulling a few dozen random opinions from Twitter and checking them against Last.fm profiles. The x-axis is an arbitrary score I assigned based on how the Tweet sounded, and the y-axis is an “eclectic” score given by some service. I’m also doing something fun with tags, but don’t know where that’s going yet.
As you can see, it’s sort-of kind-of maybe conclusive, but nothing that’s going to wow anyone. The people satisfied with Genius tend to have a less eclectic score (more mainstream taste), if that makes sense.
If you want lend me a hand, and can be bothered, give iTunes Genius an overall "satisfaction score" of between 0 and 1. I’ll compare it against your Last.fm music profile (and please leave a link if I don’t know where to find it). This should really be automated, but I don’t have the time, motivation or know how to put it together right now. Cheers!
I’ll post something more substantial when I have something more substantial to work off. Shockingly.
I’m lucky to be going to the Future of Web Apps conference this October… and unlike last year, I’m there on a proper student ticket this time. That means I get to go see talks from the likes of Digg, Google, Dopplr, Rev3, Twitter, Sun, Amazon, and Facebook (deep breath), as well as some from people you might have heard of before… Calacanis, Rose and Zuckerburg? I need to take a look through the schedule properly and think about which I’m going to go and see.
In a simply fantastic move, Carsonified (the gorgeous people organising it) just put 50 more student tickets up for grabs, so hopefully @avalentine can come along for a bit.
Put this map together this afternoon, and it scares me quite a bit. It shows the 25 teenage boys and one girl who have been killed inside the M25 since the beginning of 2008 (I think I got them all).
The Google Map is embedded, so click through if you can’t see it in an RSS reader.
No matter how much negative press the App Store is getting at the moment, I’m continually surprised by the availability (and quality) of the software you can get without spending anything at all. Trailguru is a MediaWiki (think software that runs Wikipedia) based site for tracking your running, hiking and snowboarding using GPS.
Sign up for an account on the site, install the application onto the latest generation iPhone (it does work with other devices) and hit “Start”. Location services in the phone grab your position every couple of seconds and record it along with the time you were there. When you’re done, the phone can post the trip directly to the Trailguru site, giving you a map like this. Everything on that page is automatically generated, including the very specific location information in the title.
Of course, it wouldn’t appeal nearly as much to me if there weren’t some nice stats features built in… something a little like my reports page. There’s an argument for not wanting to make this stuff so public, but it doesn’t bother me – getting all this for free means that sharing the data is worth it, in my opinion.
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